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Monday, November 21, 2016

The latest news on limiting women's (and others) medical rights

The Family Council has announced its legislative plans for anti-abortion and other anti-medical autonomy legislation.

In short, the abortion measures are aimed at a de facto, if not de jure abortion ban. For example, an end to pharmaceutical abortion — the pill regimen that prompts miscarriage in the earliest weeks of pregnancy — would be prohibited after the seventh week of pregnancy. This could occur after some women become aware of pregnancies.

Ensure abortion clinics are inspected and the Health Department shuts down clinics that fail inspection.

Close loopholes in the law letting doctors from out-of-state perform abortions in Arkansas.

Ensure Christian doctors, nurses, and pharmacists cannot be forced to participate in abortions.

Ensure Arkansas’ Medicaid programs do not pay for abortifacients or abortion coverage. (They don't now, unless they are angling to prevent use of some long-term contraceptives that some claim, erroneously, act as abortion rather than contraception.)

Oppose euthanasia and assisted-suicide in Arkansas.

Continue promoting pregnancy care centers and adoption to help women choose not to have an abortion. (In other words, apply emotional pressure to women while denying them full access to medical services.)

Understand that extending ability to medical providers to refuse to participate in abortions could doom a woman in the name of a fetus, perhaps one with little survival outside the womb.

Given the status of women with the ruling Republican Party, little opposition can be expected to most of this, save perhaps a rare medical voice injecting some science to the discussion. As ever, the courts likely will be the last resort for protection of medical rights of women.

Little Rock police have identified two women found dead of gunshot wounds in an SUV parked next to a vacant trailer in a mobile home park at 11500 Chicot Road.

Slideshows

Arkansas vs Ole Miss at War Memorial stadium in Little Rock, Saturday, Oct. 13, 2018. After leading for much of the game, Arkansas lost 37-33 when Ole Miss scored the game winning Touchdown with less that 2 minutes left.